Multitasking

Although we think that we are capable of doing several tasks at once, our brains are actually unable to and multitasking is a complete myth. It might feel like you do but our brain can only be focused on one thing at the time so our brain must switch it's attention between task. Have you ever tried to write something while talking about something else with a friend? Then you have probably experienced that you start to write whatever you are talking about and not what you were supposed to write. This is because the tasks involve communicating through speech and written words, and that causes lots of conflicts between them and the brain ends up focusing on just one of task. Although we can't multitask we can be masters of fast attention switches. A smartphone is a great example of us trying to do many things at a time. When most people are using their smartphones they have multiple apps up at the same time. They might me messaging someone and while waiting for their response they go to a different app like Instagram or Facebook. But because of our smartphones our attention spans have shortened and it's harder for us to pay attention for a longer time. Students get bored and restless during long lectures and they have a harder time learning and remembering things. Another thing is that we almost never put our phones down and we even try to work at the same time that we are using our phones. The problem is that when we give our attention to our phone for just a second, it takes us a while to get our focus back at the task that we were working on. And even though we think that we are saving time and multitasking we are actually wasting time and make everything take way longer than it should.

The Stroop Effect

Why is it that is it much harder to say the color that a word is printed in than just reading the word? This is called the stroop effect. When we did this experiment in the our class it took about twice as long for us to read the color of the world compared to the time it took to read the meaning of the word . This is because reading is something that comes naturally while identifying the color takes more processing and therefore takes longer. This observation was made in the 1930s by John Ridley Stroop. He discovered that when there is a direct conflict between the color of the word and it's meaning  two parts of the brain is stimulated at the same time and our brain has to make as decision what stimuli to pay more attention to. The right side of the brain reads the word while the left side analyzes the color. The brain becomes conflicted and it slows down our response time.

Perception and the BaMbuti

Perception is the organization, identification and interpretention of sensory information in order to understand the environment. Factors that are effecting our perception of things include attention, expectations and prior knowledge. It is obvious that you have to pay attention to something in order to get a picture of what it is and to understand it, but what kind of expectations we have is also important. So is our prior knowledge. When we see or hear something new we automatically try to identify it as something we already know, and if we don't know it we try to categorize it with something similar that we do know. But if we have no prior experience with anything like it, we might not understand it at all at first.

Colin Turnbull was a British anthropologist who during the late 1950s and early 1960s, spent a lot of time in the Ituri Forest in Congo, Africa studying the BaMbuti Pygmies. While he stayed there he lived with a 22 year old native called Kenge. Kenge had always lived in the dense forest so when he went with Colin to towards the mountains and they came across a clearing on the top of a little hill, Kenge saw a view over a bigger area for the first time. When Kenge saw the distant mountains he could not decide if they were hills or clouds. So Colin offered to drive there so that Kenge could get a closer look at them. When they got to the mountains and Kenge saw the snow covered tops he couldn't understand what it was. To Colin it was obvious because he had seen and touched snow before so he could get a clear picture what exactly was up there, but for Kenge this was all new. Then on the drive back they saw a herd of buffalo far away and Kenge asked what kind of insects they were. Colin tried to explain that they were much bigger but because they were far away they looked small. But for Kenge that was impossible to grasp because he had never seen anything from far away and could not understand why anything would look smaller than it actually was. So they drove closer to the buffalo and they got bigger just as Colin had said. Kenge still didn't understand and he thought that it was some kind of magic going on.

These are both very good examples because they show the importance that prior knowledge has to someones perception. If two people have different prior knowledge, then there perceptions will be different even if they are looking at the exact same thing. Your'e expectations are also important because since Kenge didn't expect the buffalo to become bigger he couldn't accept it at once and explain it as magic, something that he already knew about. And by paying attention he learned new things that he would now remember for the rest of his life.